ONE afternoon in the beginning of February this year, one of the senior staffers on our features team rang from the edit floor asking for a few minutes. She needed to warn me. In the way a new generation will routinely these days, she had sown a small seed on the internet. It was possible it might burgeon into a forest. As the editor of Tehelka, I stood forewarned in case any of it washed up around my ears.

The name of the seed was pink chaddi, an attempt at a whimsically subversive commentary against a right-wing lumpen group in Mangalore, who’d taken it upon themselves to be a force of civilizational morality by thrashing young pub goers. Since all acts of morality are now tied up to television exposure, they had ensured cameras were present to celebrate the roughing up. A few boys had been morally beaten too, but the main purpose of the reformers had been to chastise the young girls – who instead of marching towards purdah and sati were giving themselves up to the idle, fleeting joys of a modern outing.

The outrage was of a piece with dangerous, lawless assertions that have begun to increasingly dot the Indian landscape. It demanded that the mis-inspired reformers be acted against swiftly and severely by the administration and the police. It demanded that the media and the political class speak up strongly to quash the delusions of the foolish and the violent. It also demanded that civil society issue a reproof in its own creative ways.

As it were the authorities dithered, balancing their duties and their politics; the political class made the right noises, unsupported by any actions; and the media, after the first hysterics of a juicy story, looked for a narrative thread to keep it going. The bright angry girl on our edit floor spooled it out.

A day after she alerted me to the pink chaddis, a major newspaper talked up the initiative in a page one story. Later that afternoon I caught it debuting on a national news channel. The next morning when I came to work, a television crew was parked at the reception, waiting to interview the campaigner. During the day, I saw that the story was running on all the news channels, and in the evening, looking down into the park from my second-floor window, I saw the campaigner facing a television camera, while another crew awaited its turn.

In the next two days, the story became a forest fire. Every paper, every channel – the wide-eyed young crews trooped up and down our narrow steps. We could well have been blowing the whistle on the Gujarat killings, or exposing the rampant corruption in arms procurements. Soon the media informed us that more than thirty thousand netizens had signed up for the campaign. A fraction of these were actually going the full monty, mailing pink underwear – of all kinds – to the Mangalore reformers.

In the preceding year Tehelka had been at the forefront of breaking two crucially important stories. The first was on the unconscionable victimization of Binayak Sen, a doctor from Christian Medical College, Vellore, who had spent three decades living and working in the villages of central India, much of it in Chhattisgarh. While his less gifted (on their own admission) college mates had moved to plush corporate jobs around the world, Binayak had opted to work amid the poorest of the poor. In 2007, the local police, on fledgling and dubious evidence, and under a truly draconian act, had him locked up as a Naxalite sympathizer. A year later there was still no bail to be had. The doctor was singled out to be an example to all zealous human rights activists in the area.

Tehelka’s writer travelled through the villages where he’d been working, contrived to meet Binayak during a court appearance, and managed to get the highest police officer of the state to admit it was a mistake to have arrested the doctor. The case should have ignited India’s media. It should have become a cause célèbre. Binayak Sen’s imprisonment should have provided the perfect opportunity to focus national attention on the callous way we treat our real do-gooders, and to outline the dangerous, deepening and complicated canker at the heart of the country. Of course none of this happened. Two years on, the doctor continues to be in prison – and his despairing supporters have had to turn away from expectations of the media and look to securing his release through the more traditional legal and political routes.

 

The second story was perhaps even more important and complex. Tracking the SIMI tribunal over eleven cities and several months, a Tehelka editor had most convincingly established that under the guise of punishing anti-national activities of the Students Islamic Movement of India, the state had been party to the victimization of many innocent young Muslim boys. In fine detail, over thirty pages (and then more in later issues), the expose revealed the ignorance, prejudice and mal-intent that had governed the entire probe and the prosecution. This was a very important story, and it was based not on rhetoric but painstakingly gathered facts. It pointed to a sinister skew in the system. In any other liberal democracy the media would have picked and run with it, asking tough questions, seeking clear answers, demanding redressal. It would have worked to bring the djinn of bigotry into the light – always the first step to slaying it.

Predictably very little of this happened. The story did give pause to the random and easy demonization of SIMI, but it failed to trigger a wider soul-searching that could have begun the process of correctives that are so badly needed in this desperately fragile and radicalized time. Curiously – though, as predictably – there was some media that asked if the expose itself was an act of partisanship (especially as it came in the wake of Tehelka’s defining investigation into the Gujarat carnage of 2002). Yet again the media was happy to chase a non-narrative – catch the tail of a doberman that has no tail.

 

The above stories are being told at length because their summations are short. The media in India is no longer a healthy and reliable guide to the true significance of things. Look around. If there is a sense of mounting confusion and uncertainty everywhere, some of it can be traced back to the crises in media.

Aside from the usual banalities of providing news and opinion – tucked in between the advertising – there are two critical tasks that need to be performed by the free media in any society. The first and most important is the aggressive ordering of information to establish priorities for the public sphere. It is the reason the front page of the newspaper – or the lead bulletin on television – has crucial significance. The assumption here is that it is from this ordering that the levers of influence and execution – money and power – will take the cues to their own priorities and conduct.

Crudely put, if the media accords primary space to the suicides of farmers in Vidarbha, then politics too will be forced to turn its head in that direction. Similarly, if insider training in the stock market becomes a page one concern for journalists, there is no way that the securities exchange board and businessmen can keep from focusing on it too.

The second critical task is a robust and uncompromised critique of all things in the public domain: politics, business, lifestyle, health, arts, culture, and entertainment. Journalists must work to separate the true from the false, the wheat from the chaff, the humbug from the authentic. They must work to read every ball for what it is, and flatten the spin coming at them from every direction. If this is not done, there is a mushrooming of a discourse of falsity. And if the primary data on which a society constructs itself becomes shallow and unreliable, then a fair degree of chaos is inevitable.

 

On both these counts Indian media today stands on slippery ground. In a troubling paradox, in the last fifteen years, while the media has burgeoned dramatically, its range and depth of coverage may actually have narrowed. A recent report suggested that there are more than forty news channels – mostly national – already operational and more are on the way. The capital city of Delhi has half a dozen major daily newspapers, and all around India there are multiplying editions of Hindi and other language newspapers. Almost alone in the world, the Indian print industry is still growing, both in numbers and in revenues. And yet there is a growing discomfort about all that it fails to cover.

Through an unstated – but easily explained – consensus, the media has declared the key areas of coverage to be cinema, cricket, crime, and the stock markets. Broad passions, these are seen to be the perfect feed to net the most amount of fish. In some ways this is an unsurprising universal distillate – titillation (sports, films, crime), and money. Just that in India, as always, the needs are more complicated.

 

In a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, even the biggest newspapers and news channels end up addressing no more than a few million people. In effect, any ordinary Member of Parliament has more people behind him than most of India’s media companies. This makes for a curious situation. It means no news organization can claim to represent a truly sizeable opinion, nor can it claim to sway it. The most telling illustration of this is the fact that Mayawati sweeps to power in the fifth most populous country in the world (which is what Uttar Pradesh is, with close to 200 million people), without keeping any truck with the media. She doesn’t wine it, woo it; in fact she doesn’t even give it perfunctory access.

Mass sway then for the mass media is at best a delusion. The realization can prompt two responses. Produce a clear sense of what its true task is; or encourage an indifferent shrugging off of any sense of a greater burden. The first option is not too tough to decode. In this writer’s opinion, the true task of journalism in India is to relentlessly influence public policy and public conduct by influencing those who make it (and directly impact the lives of tens of millions on a daily basis). Primarily this means the political class, and to some smaller degree the corporate. Using all the tools at its disposal – intellectual argument, moral persuasion, the shaming expose – it should work to ensure that the big elephants of the world, power and money, hold to the covenant of the greater good, and don’t go rampaging where their self-interest takes them. Journalism here can be the small slim stick that uses the fulcrum of politics to move the disproportionately large load.

The other option is to shed the pain of the larger burden (while being clever enough to keep its halo). It doesn’t mean the absence of all public responsibility. It just means that the primary and secondary (and sometimes even tertiary) commitment now is to the bottomline, the business, the making of profits and the pleasing of shareholders. In Indian media, more than that of most countries, because of its skewed financial model, this means focusing on what the advertiser wants.

 

And what the advertiser wants is the perfect environment to flog his products. And fine products, as we know, are best flogged in air-conditioned malls, not in urban shanties and peasant landscapes. The media then has to become a sanitized mall if it wants to seduce the advertiser. So that swiftly does away with the rural, the dalit, the tribal and the dispossessed. At best – and it’s the sad, harsh truth of an unequal world – they can be allowed a token presence: like the free OPDs for the poor tucked away in an unlocatable room in swank hospitals built on state subsidized land.

So now the operational field is narrowed, made manageable. But there is still work to be done. To attract the best customers – with the fattest wallets – it also needs to be rendered a trouble-free zone. Advertisers and malls don’t like fracas, controversy, trouble. Binayak Sen in the showroom means a precipitous drop in the sales of Italian footwear. SIMI in the showroom means the mall will close down any minute. And slumdogs – unless they are millionaires – must be kept outside the gate. Ah, but pink chaddis! Pink chaddis could well excite the wallets.

Social and political churn, political and corporate expose, may be good for the country but they are bad for business. And if media is mostly about business then they are bad for media. Of course some playful sparring – mock, in the form of theatre – is fine. It can add a bit of charm, be entertaining – the well-heeled shoppers can be pleasantly amused.

 

Look at the noise of news television, and know that you are being amused. You have to salute the executives of news networks these days for the highly complex, if unarticulated, charade they are forced to orchestrate. They have to create the perfectly glossy, feel-good, sanitized media platforms on which expensive products can be sold, and at the same time create the illusion of people’s representation and public interest that will draw in the viewers. So you have shouting matches, not hard-nosed expose; you have shadow-boxing, no real fisticuffs; you get powdered noses, not bloodied ones.

When the camera moves away everyone falls upon each other in a festival of hugs and cooing. The show is over. But the reality is you need each other for the next one. And of course there is the party in the evening. The fact is, without being judgmental, the entire universe of Indian celebrity – political, showbiz, sports, corporate – has fallen into bed with Indian media. The perfect advertising environment seeks the frisson and glamour that pastry celebrities bring. Consequently, networks – as also publications – need access to celebrity to juice up their pages. (Leading to routinely absurd sights like Simi Garewal trilling with clueless abandon about bombing Pakistan.) Celebrities in turn need media to stay celebrities. It stands to reason that two people who need each other so much will not round on each other seriously.

Driven mainly by commercial concerns, never in the last sixty years has the nexus been so cosy. An almost sinister alliance of the elite: politics, business and media all dangerously in cahoots, negating all the checks and balances that make a democracy an instrument of equality and justice.

 

The culture that is created, then, is not one of robust critique but affectionate back-rubs. At this point journalism itself becomes just one more instrument of marketing and hype, not too different from advertising and public relations. Nothing else explains the endless cultural trash that gets uncritically played out day after day. Bad movies, bad music, bad books – all of which die the moment they reach the hands of the consumer, having been talked up endlessly in the media before that.

All of this has an even more deleterious underside. To play the game of uncritical puff jobs you need the services of the naïve and the young, whose primary talent is to hold a mike steady in someone’s face and to have wide eyes (and similar attributes for the endless society pages of publications). In other words there is actually a premium on ignorance, and a discount on knowledge and intelligence. Brilliant professionals blowing holes in the shallow and the pretentious, in the false and the wily, would threaten the entire superstructure of advertiser-celebrity-bottomline that has been painstakingly put together. The best fall by the wayside. A confederacy of dunces blooms.

Applied to politics and its coverage the entire construct becomes even more dangerous. The heart of every society, and the shape it will take, is determined by its politics, by the people who wield power. The single most important thing any free media can do is to police the excesses of power. There can never be enough of this policing because power is coded for malign and high-handed conduct. (Only the rarest of statesmen manage to sidestep this instinct.) Given the way media is architected today this core activity stands severely disadvantaged.

Covering politics today is little more than a mix of chumminess and ignorance. The Indian politician – easily the most astute of animals – loves it. He is happy to provided cheap spectacle – in the studio, on the ground – as long as you don’t look under his table or pry into his backyard. (Laloo Prasad Yadav epitomizes the perils of this.) Trawl the innards of any news network and you will be shocked at the number of questioning stories sitting on death row.

 

With election season upon us you can be sure you will see a lot of the easy spectacle on display. In the constituency with so and so; 24 hours with so and so; key contests; swings and see-saws. A great deal of mutual exploitation between media and politics, and very little that slices open any can of worms. Only questions that appear uncomfortable but are really not will be asked; only issues that appear contentious but are really not will be explored. Pink chaddis will be flourished; SIMI buried.

All this criticism can sound too facile and pat. And that suspicion is well-founded. Things on the ground are always more complicated. For one, there is the great safety valve of plurality and media fragmentation. The hope that competing bigotries will cancel themselves out; that there will always be some vested interest committed to blowing the whistle on someone; that it is not easy for any one person or party or business house to buy out the entire sprawl of Indian media (though there are honourable exceptions to this rule too). The counter to this of course is that the bottomline is a pretty undiscerning god, and quite capable of enforcing a uniform catechism on all its disciples. So if every media house worships at the altar of the bottomline the argument of plurality might end up running a bit weak. In fact soon there may be an urgent case for the public funding of real journalism through endowments and trusts.

 

Till then, in many ways, we have to hope for the maverick gene. That there will always be individual journalists within conforming organizations who will strike the telling blow, tell the necessary story. That there will always be conforming organizations that will in a moment of epiphany, briefly, break out of their golden cage to fight the good fight. That there will always be the magical moment when the mass of media will rise to take on an outrage whose contours are simply too terrible.

But these make mainly for hope and for exceptional moments. At present these are certainly not the dominant metabolism of Indian journalism. On both the crucial counts of ordering public priorities and providing robust criticism, we are sliding down the chute. A great deal of the future of our democracy will depend on arresting this slide and crawling our way back up. In ones and twos, and then threes and fours, mediamen have to start digging in their heels. It’s one of the surest ways to break a fall.